Disappointment drives 'Three Sisters'

SOUTH BEND - Judy Spigle admits she takes a micro-management approach to directing.

But that just hasn't been possible for her with The Acting Ensemble Stage Company's StageWorks staged reading of Anton Chekhov's "The Three Sisters" that takes place Monday at Century Center.

"As a director, this is an exercise in self-restraint for me," she says. "Six weeks of rehearsal compared to six rehearsals for 'Three Sisters,' a year of preparation versus I found out about ('The Three Sisters') this summer."

Spigle acted in The Acting Ensemble's July StageWorks production of Christopher Durang's "Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them," so she has recent experience with a staged reading's format of no costumes, sets or props and its compressed rehearsal time.

And it helps that Spigle acted in "The Three Sisters" "many years ago" at Indiana University South Bend.

"One of the things I love about the rehearsal process is the exploration of the characters and the subtext and the inner voices and the history," she says. "All of those things we might collaborate on as a cast, that has been trimmed down."

Trimmed, but not eliminated. Different cast members, Spigle says, have researched and shared via e-mail information about such things as Russian history, folk songs and pronunciation.

"In some ways, I've been apprehensive about directing a piece I haven't spent a year researching and digging my toes into," she says, "but I think we've created a collaboration in a truer sense than most plays I've worked on in that the cast is really generous with the dramaturgy and research they've been doing."

Written in 1900, "The Three Sisters" concerns its titular characters: Olga, a school teacher and, at 28, a spinster; Masha, married and conducting an affair with an army officer who is eventually transferred; and Irina, 20 and still full of expectation for happiness in love and work at the beginning of the play. All three yearn to return to Moscow, where they were raised amid the elite before moving to the provincial town where the play is set.

Their brother, Andrei, marries Natasha, who eventually takes full control of the siblings' household, marginalizing the sisters and the servants alike.

"The theme is the longing to return to Moscow, which is not a short drive for them," Spigle says. "It's never stated directly, but in one of his letters, Chekhov refers to Perm, which is 700 miles away. Getting back to Moscow is not such an easy thing. They all share that."

The three sisters are all young by contemporary standards, the director says, but by the end of the play, they've all absorbed life-changing disappointments.

"Olga has the disappointment of never having married," she says. "Masha has the disappointment of finding her true love and losing him, and Irina has the disappointment of longing to go to work, but once she starts working, she finds out work can be work. It's drudgery, and she just loathes it after having a romantic notion of what it would be like to be employed."

The three sisters, Spigle says, see themselves as now living among the uneducated, people who don't appreciate the finer things in life as they do.

"He did talk about how there were these very valuable individuals, insightful people, but as a class, the intellectual class -- doctors, people in literature -- were not really doing anything. It's possible this is an indictment of inaction," she says. "We could see it as commentary on how we're all trapped and don't really have choice -- you can't get up and just move back to Moscow."

The Acting Ensemble is using Lanford Wilson's translation of Chekhov's Russian play, and as with any translation, it differs from others of the same work. In particular, the play's final line, by Olga, is usually translated in one of three ways, and each affects the meaning: "If only we had known"; "If only we knew"; and "If only we could know."

Wilson's translation uses the third of the three options.

" 'If only we could know' points to the future, 'known' is to the past and 'knew' is more ambiguous," Spigle says. " 'If only we knew' is the one I've seen the most. ... There's a bewilderment about that as opposed to 'If only we had known,' which is all about regret. There's certainly lots of regret in the play, but part of that speech Olga has, the speech itself is not giving up hope. It's a very hopeful speech."

Rick Ellis, who founded the StageWorks series and oversees its reading committee, says a member of The Acting Ensemble requested a Chekhov play this season after seeing last year's production of "The Seagull" at the Goodman Theater in Chicago.

"(Chekhov) was right at the onset of naturalistic theater, what became real theater as opposed to the melodrama that was going on," he says. "I say we tell stories, whether to entertain or make people laugh or cry, but a lot of it is to show people how other people get through what they go through."

"I think there's a lot that we can relate to in the plays," Spigle says. "Like many playwrights, there are characters we can relate to because they're so real and (have) frustrations that are so real."

Born in 1860, Chekhov practiced professionally as a physician, but as a short story writer and playwright, he changed the direction of literature and theater by dispensing with the then-popular melodramatic format for a less plot-driven style. Four of his plays -- "The Seagull," "Uncle Vanya," "The Cherry Orchard" and "The Three Sisters" -- are now considered classics.

In "The Three Sisters," for instance, a fire and a duel both occur offstage, and Natasha's lover is talked about but never seen.

"You don't get the melodrama onstage," Spigle says. "It really is about the words, the characters and the relationships."

OnstageThe Acting Ensemble Stage Company presents Anton Chekov's "The Three Sisters" at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Century Center, 120 S. St. Joseph St., South Bend. A donation of $5 is requested. For more information, call 574-235-9711 or visit the website actingensemble.com.